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Overview
Soon to be a major motion picture!

The Zombie War came unthinkably close to eradicating humanity. Max Brooks,
driven by the urgency of preserving the acid-etched first-hand experiences of
the survivors from those apocalyptic years, traveled across the United States of
America and throughout the world, from decimated cities that once teemed with
upwards of thirty million souls to the most remote and inhospitable areas of the

planet. He recorded the testimony of men, women, and sometimes children who
came face-to-face with the living, or at least the undead, hell of that dreadful
time. World War Z is the result. Never before have we had access to a document
that so powerfully conveys the depth of fear and horror, and also the
ineradicable spirit of resistance, that gripped human society through the plague
years.

Ranging from the now infamous village of New Dachang in the United Federation
of China, where the epidemiological trail began with the twelve-year-old Patient
Zero, to the unnamed northern forests where untold numbers sought a terrible
and temporary refuge in the cold, to the United States of Southern Africa, where
the Redeker Plan provided hope for humanity at an unspeakable price, to the
west-of-the-Rockies redoubt where the North American tide finally started to
turn, this invaluable chronicle reflects the full scope and duration of the Zombie
War.

Most of all, the book captures with haunting immediacy the human dimension of
this epochal event. Facing the often raw and vivid nature of these personal
accounts requires a degree of courage on the part of the reader, but the effort is
invaluable because, as Mr. Brooks says in his introduction, “By excluding the
human factor, aren’t we risking the kind of personal detachment from history
that may, heaven forbid, lead us one day to repeat it? And in the end, isn’t the
human factor the only true difference between us and the enemy we now refer
to as ‘the living dead’?”

Note: Some of the numerical and factual material contained in this edition was
previously published under the auspices of the United Nations Postwar
Commission.

Eyewitness reports from the first truly global war

“I found ‘Patient Zero’ behind the locked door of an abandoned apartment across
town. . . . His wrists and feet were bound with plastic packing twine. Although
he’d rubbed off the skin around his bonds, there was no blood. There was also
no blood on his other wounds. . . . He was writhing like an animal; a gag muffled
his growls. At first the villagers tried to hold me back. They warned me not to
touch him, that he was ‘cursed.’ I shrugged them off and reached for my mask

and gloves. The boy’s skin was . . . cold and gray . . . I could find neither his
heartbeat nor his pulse.” —Dr. Kwang Jingshu, Greater Chongqing, United
Federation of China

“‘Shock and Awe’? Perfect name. . . . But what if the enemy can’t be shocked
and awed? Not just won’t, but biologically can’t! That’s what happened that day
outside New York City, that’s the failure that almost lost us the whole damn war.
The fact that we couldn’t shock and awe Zack boomeranged right back in our
faces and actually allowed Zack to shock and awe us! They’re not afraid! No
matter what we do, no matter how many we kill, they will never, ever be afraid!”
—Todd Wainio, former U.S. Army infantryman and veteran of the Battle of
Yonkers

“Two hundred million zombies. Who can even visualize that type of number, let
alone combat it? . . . For the first time in history, we faced an enemy that was
actively waging total war. They had no limits of endurance. They would never
negotiate, never surrender. They would fight until the very end because, unlike
us, every single one of them, every second of every day, was devoted to
consuming all life on Earth.” —General Travis D’Ambrosia, Supreme Allied
Commander, Europe

Reviews
Anytime I hear of some funny, gimmicky book suddenly becoming popular
among the hipster set, I always squint my eyes and brace myself for the worst;
because usually when it comes to such books, the worst is all you can expect to
find, an endless series of fluffy pop-culture pieces designed specifically for crafty
point-of-purchase display at your favorite corporate superstore, and then a year
later to be forgotten by society altogether. And so it's been in the last six
months as I've heard more and more about this book World War Z: An Oral
History of the Zombie War, which supposedly is a hilarious "actual" oral history
about an apocalyptic war with the undead that supposedly almost wiped out the
human race as we know it; even worse, that it had been inspired by an actual
gimmicky point-of-purchase humor book, the dreadful Zombie Survival Guide
from a few years ago which had been published specifically and only to make a
quick buck off the "overly specific survival guide" craze of the early 2000s. And
even worse than all this, the author of both is Max Brooks, as in the son of
comedy legend Mel Brooks; and if the son of a comedy legend is trawling the

literary gutters of gimmicky point-of-purchase humor books, the chances usually
are likely that they have nothing of particular interest to say.

So what a surprise, then, to read the book myself this month, and realize that
it's not a gimmicky throwaway humor book at all, but rather a serious and
astute look at the next 50 years of global politics, using a zombie outbreak as a
metaphorical stand-in for any of the pervasive challenges facing us as an
international culture these days (terrorism, global warming, disease, natural
disasters), showing with the precision of a policy analyst just how profoundly the
old way of doing things is set to fail in the near future when some of these
challenges finally become crises. It is in fact an astoundingly intelligent book, as
"real" as any essay by Seth Godin or Malcolm Gladwell, basically imagining the
debacle of New Orleans multiplied by a million, then imagining what would
happen if the Bushists were to react to such a thing in the same way; and even
more astounding, Brooks posits that maybe the real key to these future
challenges lies with the citizens of third-world countries, in that they are open to
greater and faster adaptability than any fat, lazy, middle-class American or
European ever could be. Oh yeah, and it's got face-eating zombies too. Did I
mention the face-eating zombies?

Because that's the thing to always remember, that this comes from an author
who has spent nearly his entire life in the world of comedy and gimmicky
projects, not only from family connections but also his own job as a staff writer
at Saturday Night Live from 2001 to '03; that no matter how smart World War Z
gets (and it gets awfully smart at points), it is still ultimately a fake oral history
of an apocalyptic zombie war that supposedly takes place just five or ten years
from now, starting as these messes often do as a series of isolated outbreaks in
remote third-world villages. And in fact this is where Brooks first starts getting
his political digs in, right from the first page of the manuscript itself, by using
the initial spread of the zombie virus to comment on the way such past
epidemics like HIV have been dealt with by the corrupt old white males who
used to be in charge of things; basically, by ignoring the issue as long as it
wasn't affecting fellow white males, then only paying attention after it's become
an unstoppable epidemic. In Brooks' world, just like the real one of pre-9/11
intelligence-gathering, we see that a few government smarties from around the
world really were able to catch the implications of this mysterious new virus
while it was still theoretically controllable; just that their memos and papers
went ignored for political reasons by those actually in charge, as well as getting
lost in the vast bureaucratic shuffle that the Cold War has created in the Western
military-industrial complex.

That's probably the most pleasurable part of the first half, to tell you the truth,
and by "pleasurable" I mean "witty and humorous in a bleak, horrifying,
schauenfreude kind of way" -- of watching the virus become more and more of a
threat, of watching entire cities start to go under because of the zombie
epidemic, then watching Brooks paint an extremely thinly-veiled portrait of how
the Bush administration would deal with such a situation, and by extension any
government ruled by a small cabal of backwards, power-hungry religious
fundamentalists. And in this, then, World War Z suddenly shifts from a critique
about AIDS to a critique about Iraq, showing how in both situations (the Middle
East and zombies, that is) the real priority of the people currently in charge is to
justify all the trillions of dollars spent at traditional weapon manufacturing
companies under the old Cold-War system (companies, by the way, where all
the people in charge have lucrative executive jobs when they're not being the
people in charge), leading to such ridiculous situations as a full-on tank and
aircraft charge mostly for the benefit of the lapdog press outlets who are there
covering the "first grand assault." In Iraq, unfortunately, we found that a billion
dollars in tanks still can't stop a teenage girl with a bomb strapped to her chest;
and metaphorically that might be the most chilling scene in the entirety of World
War Z as well, the press-friendly "zombie response" set up by the Bush-led
government in New York's Yonkers neighborhood, done not for good strategic
reasons but rather to show off the billions of dollars in weapons the government
had recently acquired, leading to a virtual slaughter of all the soldiers and
journalists there by the chaotic zombie hoard that eventually arrives.

This, then, gets us into the first futuristic posit of Brooks in the novel to not have
actually happened in real life yet -- the "Great Panic," that is, when the vast
majority of humans suddenly lose faith in whatever government was formerly
running their section of the world, and where mass anarchy and chaos leads to
the accidental and human-on-human deaths of several hundreds of millions of
more people. And again, by detailing a fictional tragedy like a global zombie
epidemic, and the complete failure of a Bush-type administration to adequately
respond to it, Brooks is eerily predicting here such real situations like last week's
complete meltdown of Bear Stearns (the fifth largest investment bank in the
entire United States), leading many to start wondering for the first time what
exactly would happen if the US dollar itself was to experience the same kind of
whirlwind collapse, a collapse that happens so fast (in a single business day in
the case of Bear Stearns) that no one in the endless red tape of the government
itself has time to actually respond to it?

Brooks' answer here is roughly the same one Cormac McCarthy proposed in last
year's Pulitzer-winning The Road; chaos, bloodshed, violence, inhumanity, an
everyone-for-themselves mentality from the very people we trusted to lead us in

such times of crisis. Make no mistake, this is a damning and devastating critique
of the corrupt conservatives currently in charge of things; a book that uses the
detritus of popular culture to masquerade as a funny and gross book about
zombies, but like the best fantastical literature in history is in fact a prescient
look at our current society. It's unbelievable, in fact, how entertaining and
engrossing this novel is throughout its middle, given how this is usually the part
of any book that is the slowest and least interesting; here Brooks uses the
naturally slow middle of his own story to make the majority of his political
points, and to get into a really wonky side of global politics that is sure to satisfy
all you hardcore policy junkies (as well as military fetishists).

Because that's the final thing important to understand about World War Z, is
that it's a novel with a truly global scope; Brooks here takes on not only what
such a zombie epidemic would do to our familiar US of A, but also how such an
epidemic would spread in the village-centric rural areas of southeast Asia, the
infrastructure-poor wastelands of Russia and more, and especially how each
society fights the epidemic in slightly different ways, some with more success
than others. For example, Brooks posits that in such places as India, population
density is just too high to do much of any good; in his fictional world history,
such countries are basically decimated by such a catastrophe, with there
basically being few humans even left in India by the time everything is over.
Other countries, though, used to picking up as a nation and fleeing for other
lands, survive the zombie outbreaks quite well; those who are already used to
being refugees, for example, see not too much of a difference in their usual
lifestyle from this latest turn in events, ironically making them the societies most
suited for survival in such a world. (This is opposed to all the clueless middleclass Americans in the novel, for example, who in a panic make for the wilds of
northern Canada, in the blind hope that the winter weather will freeze the
zombies into non-action; although that turns out to be true, poor planning
unfortunately results in the deaths of tens of millions of people anyway, from
hypothermia and starvation and plain ol' mass-murder.)
There are reasons to be wary of this book. The title is a little silly, and Max
Brooks's Zombie Survival Guide was tongue in cheek. Hell, he's the son of
legendary comedy director Mel Brooks. And zombies are creatures that gained
popularity thanks to film, which is contrary to the nature of most good creatures.
Vampires, ghosts, wizards, witches, dragons, orcs, goblins, angels, werewolves
and even Frankenstein's undead abomination came from literature first, and
entered film later. Film seldom contributes originality to prose. Fortunately Max
Brooks pulled off a minor miracle in adapting the largely theatrical terror into the
written word, by use of the literary apocalypse convention and oral stories. Our
familiarity with the outlines of a zombie outbreak (or any plague outbreak) from
so many films helps fill in the gaps between his various storytellers' accounts.

Brooks has a remarkable sense of voice, and places the various interviewees
well, such that they sound all the more distinct in contrast to the preceeding and
following speaker. We get a lot of interesting subjects, from the country doctor
in China who treated the first "bite," to a hitman hired to protect a millionaire
mogul, to a blind man who somehow managed to survive in the most infested
parts of Japan - Hiroshima. Thus we also get a total sense of the rise and fall of
the outbreak, with each arc illustrated by brilliant personal narratives of "true"
stories from those periods that give us a sense of not just the plot, but how
culture changed in this fictional earth. The narrative is unified by the interviewer
who visits them and directs parts of their story, but only enough so that we can
both enjoy the overarching plot and the survivors' stories.

Like the best science fiction the outlandish premise allows us to get a fresh view
of real human issues. Brooks approaches such issues on multiple levels, from
simple human interests like base selfishness and how we act in desperation, to
political crises, such as early on in the book when the Israelis and Palestinians
blame each other for the plague, and even claim it is a hoax perpetrated by their
enemies. Many of the characters are inspired by people from real life, like
Howard Dean, Karl Rove and Nelson Mandela - but rather than coming off as
cheesy, they lend an air of authenticity to the tale. There is just enough real
tension, both base and topical, to lend it the right aura for a great exercise in
modern fantasy/sci fi - it's easily one of the best fantasy/sci fi books set in the
modern world I've read in quite some time.

The quality of Brooks's book was totally unexpected. This was supposed to be a
spin-off from an impulse-buy. But by the time you finish World War Z I think
you'll hope along with me that this, his first work of fiction, won't be his last.